We’ve known about the seventh planet in our solar system for centuries, but it seems the way we pronounce Uranus recently changed.
Sir William Herschel spotted the planet Uranus on March 13, 1781, from his garden in Somerset, England. When he initially reported it a month later, it called it a comet. But it astronomers would soon realize it was actually a planet. They would name it after the Greek god of the sky. So the big question is how should you pronounce Uranus?
If I asked you that question a couple of years ago, everyone would surely have agreed on a single pronunciation.
But times change, and there has been a curious change in preference for at least a sliver of the population on this one.
A few quick facts
Uranus was the first planet to be discovered by a telescope. Prior to that, astronomers spotted the other six planets — well, five, since we didn’t “discover” Earth in the sky — with the naked eye.
When most of us were kids, we used one of a couple of handy mnemonics to remember the order (and names) of the planets. Back then, everyone agreed that we had nine planets in our solar system. These days, experts disagree on the ninth one. So poor little Pluto has, according to some, been demoted from planetary status. The mnemonic I remember went like this:
My very educated mother just showed us nine planets.
You might remember a different one.
Either way, The first letter of each word in that sentence matched the first letter of each planet’s name. It also gave you the list of planets in order from closest to furthest from the sun. The planets, then, in order from closest to the sun are Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto.
When I was a student, we learned that one of the nine planets in our solar system had a unique feature: rings. That planet, of course, was Saturn. (That would be the sixth planet.) We now know, however, that Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune also have rings, though theirs are certainly less prominent than Saturn’s.
If you’re having a bad year on Earth and you’re ready for it to be over, you’d probably hate to spend that year on Uranus. Because of its distance from the sun, a year on Uranus takes more than 30,000 Earth days. That’s the equivalent of 84 Earth years! Even the past few years haven’t seemed that long!
The pronunciation dilemma
I’ll take you back one more time to my days as a student. Back then, it seemed unanimous that everyone pronounced Uranus as “yur-AY-nus.” A simple Google search supports this pronunciation.
These days, however, more people seem to pronounce it differently, stressing the first syllable rather than the second. So it comes out as “YUR-un-us.”
But there are actually more possibilities than that.
Men’s magazine MEL reports that the Oxford English Dictionary listed its pronunciation as, “you-RAN-us” as early as 1920. If you try to pronounce it using the correct pronunciation of the Greek alphabet, you might end up with either “OOH-ran-ohs” or even “er-AH-nus.”
As to the more common pronunciation among the general public, that pesky “yur-AY-nus,” you don’t have to lower your mind too deeply into the gutter to hear the obvious problem: It sounds like a reference to “your anus.” And let’s face it: Who wants to talk about that?
A commenter at MEL suggests that newscasters around the country realized in the mid-1980s, when a space probe was preparing to do its fly-by of the planet, that this pronunciation would lead to too many snickers. So they changed it to the “YUR-un-us” pronunciation.
It’s a good story and it supports the popular notion of “blame the media,” which is a hard one for many people to pass up.
”Official’ pronunciation didn’t come from news anchors
But if you want to go by a more official source than your local news anchor, I would refer you to NASA. I imagine that with very few exceptions, they would know more about the planets. Space.com gives us this information:
According to NASA, most scientists say YOOR-un-us. Unfortunately, because it is so rarely heard outside the walls of academia, it almost seems to call even more attention to the avoided pronunciation.
The ear is the worst receptor of information. Unlike the eye, which can go back and re-read a printed passage, the ear gets “one shot” at the sound as it passes. Then it’s gone. The “YUR-un-us” pronunciation is less likely to cause that chuckle (and, thereby, make you miss whatever comes after it).
So do you want to use the “preferred” scientific pronunciation, “YUR-un-us” to avoid becoming the “butt” of a joke? (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.) Or do you want to go with the more common unofficial pronunciation that sounds like it’s all about the butt and risk causing your audience’s distraction?
Of the two, I’d go with the scientific version. If I’m going to somehow call attention to what some might consider a mispronunciation, I’d rather do it for the right reason.
